Saturday, December 19, 2015

The latest
political joke is that 30 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats in
a recent survey by Public Policy Polling agreed that they would like to see Agrabahbombed. Agrabah, it turns out, is the
capital city in Disney’s Aladdin. Nicely done, PPP – what better way to show
how blind is the American imperial use of power, and how easily accepted. Dems
are making mock of Republicans, but I’m sure that if the question had asked if they
supported Obama droning Jafar of Agrabah, there would have been close to thirty
percent, maybe more. Jafar was Aladdin’s nemesis in the movie.

There is the politics of ignorant aggression, and then
there is the politics of aggressive ignorance. The latter is being pursued by
the Governor and Legislator of Florida. Having staked out positions that
climate change is a fraud, the governing principles of Florida are having a
hard time coping with the fact that the sea level is indeed rising and South
Florida has every chance of being the 21st century Atlantis, as
Elizabeth Kolbert reports in the current New Yorker. Florida, unlikely
Louisiana, can’t really turn to the traditional levee and dike system, because
under the swamps and cities and beaches of Southern Florida, there is
limestone. Limestone is porous. You can put a levee on top of it, but the water
will just flow under the levee, through the limestone. Kolbert reports that
Miami Beach is becoming more and more like Venice, Italy, save for the fact
that the inhabitants have cars, and wait for the periodic flood waters to abate
to get around.

As for what the press laughingly calls the “adults”, the
political elite in Florida”

“Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior
senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not
far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but
is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of
Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport.
Appearing this past spring on “Face the Nation,” Rubio was asked to explain a
statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I
said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these
people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I
believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the
climate is not changing.”

Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s
governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to
discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration,
according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban
talk of sea-level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of
“nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian
restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against
them. One was Hammer [Kolbert’s interviewee, an environmental-studies
researcher who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists]who, a few years
ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation
system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change
references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like
when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has
‘climate change’ in the title.”

We are in the hands of the kind of bozos who used to populate the
cartoon The Far Side. It isn’t pretty.

Friday, December 18, 2015

This month, I have felt very much my sub-culture status. Or,
to put it another way, the media is making me feel as lonely as Eleanor Rigby.

I am one of the
members of a group that is completely and absolutely and infinitely indifferent
to Star Wars.

When the series first arrived on the scene, I did not hurry
out to see it. In fact, I have only once had the pleasure of viewing one of the
infinite sequels or prequels – someone dragged me to it. My memory is not at
all of the movie, but of the headache that I felt as I watched amateurish
muppet like creatures cavort across the screen, and heard much dialogic bombast.
If only it had really been a Muppets
movie!

Of course, where I heard bombast, others, millions of them,
heard the siren’s song. Such is life.

I am not hostile to the franchise, as I am to, say, the
James Bond franchise, which I consider a pernicious machine for spreading
racism, imperialism, sexism and all the rest of the rotten isms that are like
facets of our national psychosis. It’s the James Bond cancer, and its coming
our way in your local multiplex plus as American foreign policy, dudes!

It is almost impossible to be a fully subscribed member of
the American media hookup without absorbing mucho Star Wars lore. Darth Vader is
perhaps the most famous fictional devil figure in modern culture. But I don’t
know whether the Empire is good or bad, or exactly what it is. And the details
of George Lucas’s creation, which are debated with connoisseurial froth on
twitter, facebook, Slate, Salon, etc. make my eyes glaze over. A non-fan in a
world of fans is in a curiously embarrassing position, like a non-involved person
witnessing a domestic squabble: one has the sense of being de trop, of being put, by
sheer accident, in the position of a voyeur.

I wonder if Adam will someday want to see these movies? And
I wonder if they will seem less irrating to me as an old man than they seemed
to me as a young sprout? I’m prepared, I think. Adam, like Andy Warhol, is a
proponent of the school that says that the essence of art is not uniqueness but
repetition. Thus, there is a version of the GingerBread man (“I want the one
with the old woman in it”) that I have now heard a good twenty times. So if I
am forced to actually watch Star Wars, so be it. I plan, though, to enjoy to
the full my subculture until then.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

"I’d have to work at learning the job every hour of the day,”
he said. “It would not be easy for me to learn, because I hacve a head that is
bombed out by marijuana. I cannot remember names. I cannot remember
numbers. I don’t have a particularly
good reputation in this city. I don’t have a political machine. So if I get
elected it seems people want my ideas.
And if I get elected, this town will be more alive thanit has been in
fifty years.”

This was Norman Mailer in 1969, running for mayor, and
explaining himself to a bunch of no doubt puzzled high schoolers.

Mailer’s big idea in that campaign was to make NYC the fifty
first state. It is still an ace idea. It
would bring a little more democracy to the Senate, and shake up the House. It
would make politics on the national level – which leans to the Dems – mirror politics
on the off year, state level – when a lesser percent of the voters lean
strongly GOP.

In the sixties, there were a number of outsider candidates.
Most of them were on the left – although Mailer called himself a left
conservative. Some were on the right – Buckley, in the election cycle of 1965,
had also run for mayor.

In 1969, the traditional political machines had broken down,
and the new media based political technologies were in their infancy. Joe
McGuinness wrote a book about how Richard Nixon was packaged and sold like
cigarettes or pop, and this was considered some kind of indictment. Today, this
is what the elites expect and want. The odd tone of melancholy around the
failure of Jeb Bush’s campaign, for instance, has to do, primarily, with how
beautifully machined it all was. The money! The advertisements! The meaningless
endorsements! It is the rocket that gets the awe – the astronaut inside, in
this case Bush, is a sort of afterthought.

Mailer’s idea were fruity, and yet rather nice. For
instance, Sweet Sunday – once a month all vehicular traffic, including planes,
would be banned, and New Yorkers would experience the city’s birdlife. On
crime, Mailer leaned to a solution grounded in Renaissance Florence – the creation
of autonomous neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods, urban anonymity – which Mailer
thought was at the root of crime – would be dispelled. Of course, he presented
it more floridly than that, claiming that some neighborhoods might allow
fucking on car hoods and some might keep fucking private.

The outsider candidate is now in a sad state. From Mailer to
Trump is not the arc that leads to greater enlightenment. This is what I truly
find depressing about Trump, for in terms of form – dispensing with the pr
technology, getting on the news constantly, becoming an issue of conversation –
is what I would like to see. I wanted it to be Bernie Sander’s gig. I think, in
a way, Sanders will last longer, but Trump has put a very ugly cast into this
election, and into a national mood that is characterized by the self-evidence
of the slogan, Black Lives Matter, in a society where the powers that be show –
that old Jim Crow state - this isn’t true every day.

There’s a long, submerged connnection between the two
vocational types: artist and politician. Both began to take shape in the 14th
and 15th century, within a system of patronage generated by the
court and Church. Both have followed a historical logic in which the struggle
for autonomy has defined the language and inner experience of both types. And
both are exhausted. Just as the Party
has drained out its differentiating substance at the same time that it is the
defining reference for the politician, so, too, the various schools and trends
that define the artist seem, at the moment, both pointless and indispensable –
we can’t talk about the artist except by way of that grid. We, or at least I,
long for the outsider, the disrupter, the amateur, as a way of kicking to the
curb this dead form. But the dead form seems to be overwhelming, it seems to be
everywhere, and the outside that, at least, I long for, has no footing, no note
it can seize and join the chorus.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.